Public Relations (PR)
Having media and other influentials mentioning your company online and/or offline is almost guaranteed to increase your brand awareness and thought leadership, and as a result increase sales.
As opposed to full-fletched PR agencies (that charge a tonne for their services), we want to demystify and simplify the whole PR process, and make it part of something you can do yourself.
Press Releases
Besides the numerous online services for submitting press releases, Together with our clients we create a media contacts database for your industry niche (for the client to keep) and draft press releases that usually at least some journalists pick up. It may sound simple, but we got our clients even into Financial Times (FT) this way!
Articles and Blogs
Another great way to reach out is to write formal articles and informal blogs. To have an article published in the most relevant magazines and trade publications for your market segment is of course great, but how do you get there? Unless you pay for it ("advertorial"), you need something to say, and you need to already be recognized as someone that has something to say. If you do, media pitching may help. If you don't it sounds like Catch 22? Not really, you can start with a blog.
It may take time to find your voice when blogging, and it may take time for others to find your blog, but it is a great way to start. Write about your view of the industry you are in and what you think will happen in the future, but don't sell. Blogs are not press releases, not news, not articles, they fit nicely inbetween, are usually informal in tone and can be as short or as long as you want.
Our clients that have started blogging have seen one or many of the following benefits:
- Media following and covering what they say in their blogs.
- Invitations to write articles in relevant magazines and industry journals.
- Invitations to deliver speeches and key notes at industry events.
- Traffic from search and referal links, which goes hand in hand with our SEO services.
- Requests for consulting and/or product sales.
News Releases
Many years ago PR was something mysterious, and PR agencies positioned themselves as the magic link between the corporate world and editors and journalists, which by then was the only way to get coverage in media. When blogging emerged bloggers were seen as journalist wannabees and not taken seriously. Not only did that change, and change fast, it almost reversed. If you are a niche blogger and represent a forward thinking company in your industry (or an individual building a personal brand), you almost by definition get treated more as an expert than journalists. Their job is to cover what is happening in the industry, your job (if done right) is to define the industry.
With new technology and new ways of distributing what you have to say, and more people having something to say via blogs and the like, press releases have gone from being exclusive to media to being open to anyone using search engines, Google News and Alerts etc. Therefore today many refer to them as news releases, since not only media pick them up. Bloggers that like what you have to say and mention it in blog posts may in turn be followed by journalists and trigger media coverage. Media pitching is no longer the exclusive domain of PR agencies, and smaller companies can now reach out almost without cost. What do you have to say? Just say it.